Questions & Objections

“If you reopen every conviction, you’ll overwhelm the courts.”

Repealing the habeas deadline does not mean every conviction gets relitigated. Petitioners must still demonstrate a valid constitutional claim — the merits standard doesn’t change. What changes is that the courthouse door stays open. Texas has no filing deadline at all for state habeas in non-capital cases: an application under Article 11.07 of its Code of Criminal Procedure may be filed at any time, subject only to the equitable doctrine of laches — case-by-case fairness instead of a fixed cutoff. New York allows a motion to vacate a judgment “at any time” (CPL § 440.10). The overwhelming majority of prisoners do not have viable claims and will not file. Those who do have viable claims are, by definition, the people the system should be hearing.

“This is soft on crime.”

This is the opposite. When an innocent person is in prison, the guilty person is free. Every wrongful conviction means an unsolved crime and a victim without justice. Conviction integrity is not soft on crime — it is the definition of getting it right. Chief Justice Peterson, a conservative jurist appointed by Governor Deal, is not soft on crime. Seven of nine justices on Georgia’s highest court called for these reforms.

“the Conviction Integrity Act’s new institutions will cost too much.”

The Georgia Conviction Integrity Commission would cost approximately $1.5–2.0 million annually — 0.14% of the corrections budget. Meanwhile a wrongful conviction costs Georgia twice: $31,614 a year to incarcerate the person (GDC’s own FY2024 figure for state prisons) and, once the conviction is overturned, $75,000 for every year served under SB 244. On the incarceration cost alone the commission breaks even at 79 wrongful convictions a year; counting the compensation it avoids, at 24. Bills A and B require zero appropriations. Legal access, plea reform, and prosecutor disclosure requirements in the Conviction Integrity Act take effect immediately without funding.

“Why can’t the court fix this itself?”

Chief Justice Peterson answered this directly: the problems are “creatures of decisional law” — rules the court created through decades of case-by-case decisions. The court could reverse course, but seven justices chose instead to call on the legislature to act. Why? Because legislative action is more durable, more comprehensive, and more democratically legitimate than judicial reversal. The legislature created the habeas deadline. Only the legislature can repeal it. The separation-of-powers case for legislative action is made in full on The Sleeping Giants, Argued →

“How do you know 2,500 to 5,000 people are wrongfully convicted?”

An estimated 2,500 to 5,000 innocent people are in Georgia’s prisons. No one can count them directly — a wrongful conviction becomes visible only when it is overturned, and most never are. The estimate applies published wrongful-conviction rates to the 52,268 people in GDC custody (GDC Friday Report, September 18, 2026). It is a conservative estimate derived from other states’ testable cases, not a Georgia count. The published rates it rests on: Loeffler, Hyatt & Ridgeway (2019), Journal of Quantitative Criminology 35(2):259–286, found that 6% of prisoners self-reported a wrongful conviction, with the rate varying sharply by offence type; a 2017 NIJ/Urban Institute review of Virginia cases put its own upper bound at 11.6%, for sexual-assault convictions only; and Gross et al. (2014), in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimated a 4.1% false-conviction rate among defendants sentenced to death — a capital-case figure, not a general rate, and not the source of the Georgia estimate. GPS publishes 2,500 to 5,000 deliberately as a conservative range that sits below what those rates, applied to the people in GDC custody, would imply.

“Finality matters. Victims need closure.”

Finality built on a wrongful conviction is not closure — it is a second injustice. When the wrong person is convicted, the victim’s family believes justice was done while the actual perpetrator remains free. True finality comes from getting the right answer, not from stopping the question. Every exoneration in Georgia history has also been a cold case reopened.